St. Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin and
Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third
was neither but thought she was both. Many other people have thought so
too. In 1998 readers responding to a Modern Library poll identified Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead as the two greatest novels of the twentieth century—surpassing Ulysses, To the Lighthouse and Invisible Man.
In 1991 a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month
Club found that with the exception of the Bible, no book has influenced
more American readers than Atlas Shrugged.

One of those readers might well have been Farrah Fawcett. Not long
before she died, the actress called Rand a "literary genius" whose
refusal to make her art "like everyone else's" inspired Fawcett's
experiments in painting and sculpture. The admiration, it seems, was
mutual. Rand watched Charlie's Angels each week and, according to Fawcett, "saw something" in the show "that the critics didn't."

She described the show as a "triumph of concept and casting." Ayn said that while Angels was uniquely American, it was also the exception to American television
in that it was the only show to capture true "romanticism"—it
intentionally depicted the world not as it was, but as it should be.
Aaron Spelling was probably the only other person to see Angels that way, although he referred to it as "comfort television."

So taken was Rand with Fawcett that she hoped the actress (or if not
her, Raquel Welch) would play the part of Dagny Taggart in a TV version
of Atlas Shrugged on NBC. Unfortunately, network head Fred
Silverman killed the project in 1978. "I'll always think of 'Dagny
Taggart' as the best role I was supposed to play but never did," Fawcett
said.

Rand's following in Hollywood has always been strong. Barbara
Stanwyck and Veronica Lake fought to play the part of Dominique Francon
in the movie version of The Fountainhead. Never to be outdone
in that department, Joan Crawford threw a dinner party for Rand in which
she dressed as Francon, wearing a streaming white gown dotted with
aquamarine gemstones. More recently, the author of The Virtue of Selfishness and the statement "if civilization is to survive, it is the altruist
morality that men have to reject" has found an unlikely pair of fans in
the Hollywood humanitarian set. Rand "has a very interesting
philosophy," says Angelina Jolie. "You re-evaluate your own life and
what's important to you." The Fountainhead "is so dense and
complex," marvels Brad Pitt, "it would have to be a six-hour movie."
(The 1949 film version has a running time of 113 minutes, and it feels
long.) Christina Ricci claims that The Fountainhead is her favorite book because it taught her that "you're not a bad person if you don't love everyone." Rob Lowe boasts that Atlas Shrugged is "a stupendous achievement, and I just adore it." And any boyfriend
of Eva Mendes, the actress says, "has to be an Ayn Rand fan."

But Rand, at least according to her fiction, shouldn't have attracted
any fans at all. The central plot device of her novels is the conflict
between the creative individual and the hostile mass. The greater the
individual's achievement, the greater the mass's resistance. As Howard
Roark, The Fountainhead's architect hero, puts it:

The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the
inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new
thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first
motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible.
The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful.
But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered
and they paid.

Rand clearly thought of herself as one of these creators. In an
interview with Mike Wallace she declared herself "the most creative
thinker alive." That was in 1957, when Arendt, Quine, Sartre, Camus,
Lukács, Adorno, Murdoch, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Rawls, Anscombe and Popper
were all at work. It was also the year of the first performance of Endgame and the publication of Pnin, Doctor Zhivago and The Cat in the Hat.
Two years later, Rand told Wallace that "the only philosopher who ever
influenced me" was Aristotle. Otherwise, everything came "out of my own
mind." She boasted to her friends and to her publisher at Random House,
Bennet Cerf, that she was "challenging the cultural tradition of two and
a half thousand years." She saw herself as she saw Roark, who said, "I
inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps,
stand at the beginning of one." But tens of thousands of fans were
already standing with her. In 1945, just two years after its
publication, The Fountainhead sold 100,000 copies. In 1957, the year Atlas Shrugged was published, it sat on the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-one weeks.

Rand may have been uneasy about the challenge her popularity posed to
her worldview, for she spent much of her later life spinning tales
about the chilly response she and her work had received. She falsely
claimed that twelve publishers rejected The Fountainhead before
it found a home. She styled herself the victim of a terrible but
necessary isolation, claiming that "all achievement and progress has
been accomplished, not just by men of ability and certainly not by
groups of men, but by a struggle between man and mob." But how many
lonely writers emerge from their study, having just written "The End" on
the last page of their novel, to be greeted by a chorus of
congratulations from a waiting circle of fans?